Layout Panel not working with images and footage
-
Hello,
I’m suddenly not able to get the layout options to work with images and footage. Some more info:
-
Layout options for text are working
-
Image and footage layers are dynamically updating from my data source, just not responding to the layout panel
-
I was experiencing this problem on 2.9. I upgraded to 3.0 to see if it would fix the issue
-
I confirmed that the new “Use Templater’s Layout Engine” box was selected in 3.0
-
Restarted After Effects and my PC
Any ideas what else I can try to troubleshoot?
Thanks!
-
-
Hmmm, that’s quite odd. If you were having this issue with Templater 2.9.7 as well as 3.0, I don’t believe the “Layout engine” option would be a factor since that wasn’t added until the latest release.
The first thing I would check would be to see if the Templater layout engine is working on a brand new document. I’d suggest creating a new doc, adding a single text line, applying Templater, and setting the “Align To” option to “Top”.
If a new document can use the Template layout options, we might be dealing with an Expression or Plugin overriding Templater’s layout features. We’ve used Expressions in the past to perform certain types of formatting that aren’t available with the basic options in Templater, and it’s possible that some residual code or another layout plugin may be causing this issue.
If the layout still doesn’t work in a brand new .aep file, we’re probably looking at a situation where Templater is corrupted or installed incorrectly. If that’s the case, I’d recommend fully removing all versions of Templater from the system and downloading a fresh copy of the installer from the Dataclay website.
Keep in mind that Templater 3.0 is split into two installers, Standard and Legacy. Standard is for AE 2022 and above, and Legacy is for 2021 and below. If you continue to have issues, we’ll probably need to take a look at some screenshots of the project, the layer or layers in question that aren’t formatting, as well as the Templater Preferences window. We’ll also want to look at the templater.log file for this project to see if there are any clues there.
If we need to go down that road, I’d recommend contacting us directly at support@dataclay.com since the templater.log file, in particular, could contain details you may not want to share on a public forum.
Let us know how it goes, and we’ll see where we need to go from there.
Thanks!
-
@yansfeld Have you been able to make any progress, yet? My hunch is that if you look in the
templater.logfile that should be next to your AEP file, you’ll see that there was a layout issue with one footage layer that is stopping the layout process on the rest of your footage layers. -
-
Quick update, I think you were both on the right track @Jeff and @Jon. I believe the issue was a plugin / script that I had applied to some footage layers a while ago. Somewhere in updating AfterEffects, the UI Panel for those scripts was lost from the program files, but the settings were still present in the effects panel in AE. I removed all comps that had that effect applied and now it’s all working as expected. Thanks again for your help and follow up.
A follow up question — why would the presence of this effect on compositions other than the target / previewed composition create this issue for Templater?
-
The answer is most likely going to have to do with the way that Templater processes project files. Because of how tangled and dependent AE projects can become, Templater reversions all the layers in all the comps in a project when it runs. This is mainly to ensure that layers aren’t accidentally left out of the process due to an error in dependency logic.
That’s just a guess, but we’ve seen issues in the past where Expressions on plugins that aren’t being used can cause an issue since they still need to be reversioned when Templater runs.
It sounds like everything is running normally, but if you run into any other issues or have any further questions, please feel free to get in touch. Thanks!
